I'd like to thank sci-fi songwriter John Anealio and author Patrick Hester for having me on their Functional Nerds podcast to talk about home recording and potentially totally ruin the good thing they have going with my fevered stutterings about home recording gear, the importance of finishing the song first, and when to be nitpicky vs. when to release the darn thing.
Also, I wasn't kidding about the pure terror, gosh I wish I could just relax and toss insightful witticisms back and forth with practiced ease.
Here's some post-show errata and links to stuff mentioned in the episode:
REAPER recording software - since the last time I used REAPER, they've added a Mac OSX version, yay! Also, REAPER is "free" to mess around with but they ask for a $60 license fee if you plan to use it regularly. It's a ridiculously good deal.
There's also a bunch of stuff we didn't talk about, such as: headphone mixing vs. using monitors, "mastering" for earbuds, the challenge of recording in bedrooms, the George Lucas-y benefits of being able to retcon your own songs, etc. that probably would have been cool to cover but I probably would have talked for another two hours. But the takeaway, as Patrick mentions about halfway through, is this stuff is out there now, for any and all comers to try their hand at making recordings. So get to it!
All of the bands I play with still sell lots of CDs. These Kin to Stars samplers will be available at our Folklife Festival show on Saturday, May 26.
Truth be told, we had the actual discs made a few months back and planned to make our own DIY sleeves with rubber stamps and cardboard blanks from Stumptown. We made about 20 sleeves of, ahem, varying quality before giving up. Then a few weeks ago I got frustrated not having "proper" sleeves and just went ahead and designed the printed ones you see above.
And just to be clear: nobody complained about the cardboard-and-stamp sleeves. There's a certain precious charm that comes with the arts-and-crafts side of DIY. When I went to my first SXSW Music (before there was either an Interactive or Film) I was blown away at the creativity of dirt-poor musicians who mass-produced their own cassettes on 2-deck stereos, designing the inserts with clip art and glue sticks, decorating CD blanks with Crayola markers. But that was done out of necessity due to lack of funds and access to required machinery.
Musicians are still dirt-poor, but costs have come so far down since those days. What used to cost thousands now costs hundreds, and artists have more options than ever before. I didn't abandon the DIY sleeves because I disliked the DIY-ness of it all. I abandoned them because the average Instagram photo is the perfect size and quality for album art, and because a run of printed sleeves now costs less than our time is worth stamping and folding. And that is super-weird and awesome to comprehend. We've come a long way from those days standing in line at Kinko's.
Super-happy to get this one out the door as it seems to be a crowd favorite at shows. Jerin wrote the chorus and first verse years ago, and brought it to one of our songwriting sessions last spring where she and I worked up the rest of the tune. The guitar and drum arrangements were done by me, using the DM6Kit and Garageband's built-in amp modeling mojo.
I'm sure I don't have to tell y'all that sharing a song via a tweet, a "like", a "plus" or what-have-you is every bit as valuable as buying it these days. So please know that we appreciate your support no matter how you choose to express it. Which is a polite way of saying: you can haz piano pop? Yes, you can haz, and please haz it along to your piano pop-loving friends, too.
Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » You’ve Got To Be There For The Accident. Participation is mandatory. The next time some musician is bitching at you about how the internet and piracy is destroying everything, check their website (if they have one) and see how many gigs they're playing, the date of their last release, the number of fans in their fanclub.
HBO Has Only Itself To Blame For Record 'Game Of Thrones' Piracy - Forbes. And this more or less outlines why I'm agreement with The Oatmeal (NSFW) and not Andy Ihnatko. It's bad enough when a popular show like GoT isn't available, but we don't just watch anymore. We tweet, we blog, we share, we make funny Team Lanister! t-shirts and head-on-a-stake cake pops and we can't participate because there's only one way to legally experience the show. Scarcity ain't like it used to be.
So I was out in the front yard yesterday taking advantage of our early sunny weather to clean up the weed-choked planter by the front steps. I managed to grab ahold of some rooty, woody-stemmed thing and yank the contents of the planter out in a massive ball of roots and soil, and as I did this a single hornet came buzzing out.
There in the bottom of the empty planter was a hornet nest the size of a tennis ball. Lucky for me, the wayward hornet seemed to be the only tenant. It had found the drain hole at the bottom of the planter and decided to set up shop. As I went inside to get the wasp spray, I decided I was glad to find the nest now – otherwise we'd have hornets flying around our yard all summer and no clue where they came from.
I gave the paper nest a good soaking, and when no other hornets came out I tipped the planter into yard waste can. The nest rolled in and broke apart, revealing a honeycomb-like core. And nestled into the cells of the comb, in a tight little ring, were about eight totally gross hornet larvae.
My reaction was somewhere between ewww and cooool and as I leaned in for a closer look I realized that the way they were arranged reminded me of nothing so much as chambered bullets in a revolver. Which makes total sense because everyone knows hornets are nature's small arms fire.
When the head hornet came back I squirted her too so she couldn't shoot me with more hornets.
Hey, when I redesigned this site late last year I scrapped a lot of stuff that I'm just now getting around to putting back. I never intended to turn comments off permanently, I basically just gave up on the design. They're back on now, and eventually I'll get around to bringing the Demo Club stuff back too. I was having all kinds of weird mental/emotional issues about the number of links and other garbage littering my old design. Actually, maybe that was just "winter."
Turning off comments seems to be a thing and while I can respect the reasons some people have for doing so, I've never felt the action was very welcoming. I'm sure there are people out there with haters to deal with, and I suppose that the presence of haters indicates you're doing something interesting. If you've earned a sizeable readership you've earned the right to moderate the incoming praise and/or scorn.
There's just something off-putting about coming across an insightful blog that has commenting disabled, dispiriting when it includes a multi-point post outlining all the reasons they've turned off comments, and maybe a little graceless when the post goes on to state that people who wish to comment should start a blog of their own. A lot of this is done in the name of "raising the level of discourse" or whatever, with analogies involving living rooms and what should and should not be said in them.
If blogs are the living rooms of the web, there's a contingent out there still covering their furniture in plastic wrap and asking us not to use the good cloth napkins. There is also spam, and haters. So -- pull up the drawbridge and we'll converse from our towers via Trackback smoke signals? Is Trackback still a thing?
While my friends continue to gravitate toward vintage API consoles, 2" analog reels and bespoke condenser microphones, I seem to be hellbent on recording with the cheapest gear possible. I probably won't rest until technology allows me pristine 24-bit audio clarity from shouting into tin cans strung with waxed twine.
Case in point: a few weeks back I bought a Korg nanoKONTROL2 which is a "slimline" control surface for mixing audio on computers.
A bit of explanation: most audio recording software has on-screen controls that mimic the buttons, knobs and sliders you'd see on a real mixing board in a real studio. It looks cool but it's a challenge to use these controls with a mouse or touchpad, especially if you just want to bump up a slider just a teensy weensy little bit. So smart hardware people came up with "control surfaces" -- a device with real buttons/knobs/sliders to control the fake ones on the screen.
Control surfaces can be very fancy and expensive but with the explosion of cheap n' easy home recording and laptop/tablet DJing it was inevitable that there'd be some cheaper options. The nanoKONTROL2 seems to be built specifically for those people in mind. It's USB powered so you just plug it in like you would a mouse. If you're using Garageband or Logic you can download a driver from the Korg website and go to town.
Here are some thoughts after using it for a few weeks:
It does exactly what it advertises. You get eight channels, each with volume slider, panning knob and buttons for mute, solo and arm (for recording). They work seamlessly with Garageband. The play/stop/record shuttle control is way nicer to use than awkwardly stabbing the space bar, and less noisy, too -- I can't count the number of times I've had to edit out the clack of a keypress at the end of a take. The marker controls aren't particularly useful unless you're working with video. Buttons are backlit when active.
It doesn't do much else.You can't really assign the controls to anything else, so don't expect to use the nanoKONTROL2 for recording automation or tweaking effects parameters. Updated: in the comments, Anders points out that he's successfully mapped the nanoKONTROL2 to things other than channel controls, so the deleted section maybe only applies to Garageband. Some pricier controllers can reset their knobs and dials to match your current project settings and commit settings to memory. You don't get that here, obviously. I've found the nanoKONTROL2 is best for when you want to get a mix going quickly from scratch. Once you've set some automation curves for volume or panning though, you can forget using this controller, as it has no effect on those.
It's small and light. If you're the type to record and mix on the go, like for podcasts or basic live recording, the nanoKONTROL2 is great. You can easily throw it in your pack with your laptop. It's probably ideal for Ableton Live users and DJs too. Take it on your next airplane jaunt and work on your electronica suite.
Build quality is meh. What did you expect for under $100? The buttons are hard rubbery plastic; the pan knobs are pretty smooth and tight; the channel controls are also smooth but the plastic sliders are a bit loose on a few, kind of like loose teeth. I feel like I got a "good" one and suspect that the quality might vary from item to item. It comes in white or black, and honestly it's not all that hot to look at. Overall the nanoKONTROL2 feels toyish, like it might end up unused in a junk drawer someday next to the 3rd gen iPod.
This is awesome. I LOVE the future. Cheapness aside, it's really great to be able to plug in the nanoKONTROL2 and get to mixing, being able to better "feel" where each instrument sits in the mix and control those levels more precisely than with a mouse. And did I mention it was under $100?
Overall, not too shabby for something I literally bought off a hanging rack like a pair of fancy socks. In the next version I'd like to see a cluster of, I don't know, maybe four generic knobs that were assignable to nearly anything, so you could tweak things like compression levels and envelope points with the same level of accuracy. As it is, you'll probably end up abandoning the nanoKONTROL2 once your keeper takes are recorded and basic levels are set.
And also: there's gotta be a market for just-as-simple but less ugly versions of these things. I can totally see this thing with all the same functionality but with the brushed aluminum deliciousness of a Macbook Air, with high-quality knobs and sliders.
If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it's no longer your work--the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval.
Does "Mastered for iTunes" matter to music?. Short answer: OF COURSE IT DOES. I'd wager more people own earbuds than home stereo equipment. Interesting tidbit about how Rick Rubin influenced the sound quality of iTunes files.
Spam-erican Apparel « DIS Magazine. A look at the dark, weird side of print-on-demand. I've used Zazzle lots of times for short-run shirts and mugs and the quality is better than most. That said, yeah, there's no real cost to creating anything on Zazzle so people are free to create a zillion shirts in the hope they'll appeal to a few customers.
Check out this best-ever anniversary gift from my wife. It starts out as a rather nice, perfectly utilitarian leather wallet (a little scuffed here from a few weeks of use):
Then you flip it over for the BIG REVEAL:
It's perfect. Perfect!
PERFECTION I SAY.
And not a moment too soon, as I often carry random picks in my old wallet which shake loose into my jeans pockets. Here's the guitar pick harvest from the day from the latest load of laundry:
My wife is the best. I'm sure yours is nice but mine is THE BEST.
